A chartered plane with 1,012 American boars aboard arrived in central China's Hunan Province on Sunday, the second time for the province to import breeding swine from the United States.

The plane departed from Chicago. The boars will be quarantined for 45 days before they are distributed to pig farms in the province and neighboring areas.

The boars were imported by China Animal Husbandry Group. They were selected from six pig farms in the U.S. and underwent a quarantine inspection before boarding the plane.

In 2012, Hunan imported more than 1,000 boars from the U.S. for the first time through chartered flight.

Importing boars can improve the quality of local breeding swine for Hunan, one of the major pig raising provinces in the country, said Wang Xinwu, deputy head of the Hunan Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau.